


Lean Cuisine

by Robin Hood (kjack89)



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, Fluff and Humor, M/M, Minor Gun Violence, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-29 03:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17800511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kjack89/pseuds/Robin%20Hood
Summary: “I hope you’re not planning on spending the entire evening here.”Barba cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, I have a date—”“You do?” Carmen burst, eyes widening.“—with myself,” Barba finished, his very obvious joke now falling incredibly and painfully flat.





	Lean Cuisine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ships_to_sail](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ships_to_sail/gifts), [AHumanFemale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AHumanFemale/gifts).



> For STS and AHF as a slightly belated Valentine's gift and because they tolerate me <3
> 
> Usual disclaimer. Please be kind and tip your fanfic writers in the form of comments and/or kudos!

A light knock sounded on Barba’s door and he called without looking up, “You can come in, Carmen.”

He did glance up when the door opened and Carmen poked her head in. “Hey,” she said lightly. “Just wanted to let you know I’m heading out.”

“Already?” Barba asked, glancing at the clock, because normally when Carmen felt the need to tell him she was leaving, it was with a not-so-subtle sense of disapproval that it was already 9pm and he was showing little sign of getting ready to go home, but he was pretty certain it couldn’t be even half past six yet.

Sure enough, it was only 6:25, and he raised an eyebrow at Carmen, who didn’t even even look remotely abashed. “It’s the fourteenth,” she informed him, as if that answered his unspoken question, and at his blank look, added, “You know, Valentine’s Day.”

Barba blinked. “Oh,” he said. “Of course.” He cleared his throat, feeling distinctly embarrassed that he hadn’t already made that connection. “Plans with Nicole, I assume?”

“Dinner and a movie, nothing too fancy,” Carmen told him, and she had the good sense to hesitate before saying, “I hope you’re not planning on spending the entire evening here.”

Barba cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, I have a date—”

“You do?” Carmen burst, eyes widening.

“—with myself,” Barba finished, his very obvious joke now falling incredibly and painfully flat.

Neither he nor Carmen seemed to be able to look at each other for a few exceptionally awkward moments.

“Anyway,” Barba said, clearing his throat again, “have fun tonight. Tell Nicole I say hi.”

“Of course,” Carmen said quickly. “And you should, um, go home. Even if you don’t have…” She trailed off, clearly deciding against what she was planning on saying, and Barba busied himself with some papers on his desk as an excuse to not look at her. “Any exciting plans,” she finished, a little lamely, before adding, falsely bright, “At least home has to be better than staying here all night, right?”

Barba forced a smile. “Of course,” he said. “And don’t worry about me, just go have fun.”

For a moment, it looked as if Carmen was going to say something to that, but she settled for shaking her head slightly before smiling at him. “Thanks,” she said. “And Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Barba sighed as he glanced down at the casefile in front of him. He was neither young enough nor insipid enough to care much about a not-holiday like Valentine’s Day, even if a small part of him missed the days when he could wander to some singles event at a bar and at the very least spend Valentine’s Day with someone.

Technically, he still _could_ , but the years of working in sex crimes had turned him off from that idea. Besides which, he wasn’t entirely sure he could muster the energy for that kind of thing tonight anyway.

Which was, frankly, pathetic, but Barba had mostly made his peace with that.

Barba snuck a look at his watch and groaned when he realized only five minutes had passed since he had last checked the time, and the only thing he had managed to do was read the same paragraph — and Carisi’s scribbled notes in the margin regarding what he clearly deemed relative case law — three times while absorbing exactly none of it.

Perhaps Carmen was right, and he might as well do this at home. After all, when was the last time he actually saw the inside his apartment before the 11 o’clock news?

Mind made up, he packed away the casefile he was nominally supposed to be reading as well as a half-dozen more on the off chance he got done early and left his office, feeling like the entire thing was something of a Valentine’s Day miracle. So to speak, anyway.

At least until he saw the Prime Time pricing on Lyft, which soured his mood rather spectacularly.

Still, he had his couch and a nice bottle of scotch that Liv had gotten him for Christmas waiting for him, so Barba managed to recover something of his good mood as he got closer to his building, or at least, he recovered somewhat until his stomach gave a traitorous growl, loudly enough that the Lyft driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Barba quickly pulled out his phone and opened Grubhub to order some food but winced when he saw the delivery times.

Of course. It was Valentine’s Day. And plenty of people were choosing to order in.

With a sigh, he pocketed his phone and leaned forward to tell the Lyft driver, “You can drop me on the corner here.”

The Lyft driver glanced back at him. “You sure?” she asked.

“Positive,” Barba sighed. “I forgot I need to run to the bodega, so you might as well save me the trip.”

Though the Lyft driver shrugged, she didn’t argue any further, just pulled over to the curb and let him out. “Thanks,” Barba told her before trudging into the bodega like a man making the walk to the electric chair.

He was perhaps being slightly melodramatic, but the fact that it was Valentine’s Day and he was buying dinner for himself at the bodega had caused whatever slight cheer he had at the prospect of working at home to completely evaporate.

The fact that he was hungry wasn’t helping matters either.

Barba avoided eye contact with the cheerful man behind the bodega counter as he made the walk of shame down the aisle to the freezer in the back so he could grab whatever single-serving frozen meal looked the least pathetic. He caught sight of his reflection in the slightly-fogged glass of the freezer door and winced.

He looked tired.

Hell, he looked _old_.

Thankfully, there was no one besides the man behind the counter to see him, and truth be told, he had seen Barba looking far worse than he currently did, including the previous year, when he had forgotten to get his flu shot and ended up down for the count for an entire week, only leaving his apartment to stumble to the bodega in search of Nyquil and Kleenex (his mother, bless her, had already brought an industrial-size tub of Vicks VapoRub earlier in the week, and for once, he wasn’t even tempted to roll his eyes at her insistence — as all good Cuban mothers would similarly insist — that it was a cure-all).

Shaking his head, he tore his eyes away from his reflection to glance at the assorted selection of frozen meals, his heart sinking at the distinct lack of selection. He had just reached in to grab the first one he saw that didn’t actively make him nauseous — a chicken alfredo Lean Cuisine that looked like it had been in there longer than he cared to think about — when he heard the bell over the door jingle, and he glanced over his shoulder automatically to see who else was sad enough to be hitting the bodega for dinner on Valentine’s Day.

It was a white guy in a dark hoodie, and for some reason, maybe just the way he seemed to skulk into the place, the sight made the hairs on the back of Barba’s neck stand up. He grabbed the Lean Cuisine and started toward the counter, hoping that he could get out of there before whatever was about to go down did.

Not that anything was going to happen. Probably. Hopefully.

He’d probably still call the police from the safety of his apartment just in case. Especially since he’d rather call from there than from where he was currently standing between an endcap full of laundry detergent and a case of frozen burritos.

But whatever wayward Valentine’s Day magic he’d been feeling earlier in the evening dissipated entirely when the guy in the pulled out a gun, and Barba gulped before ducking down behind, fumbling for his phone. He dialed 911 on instinct alone and raised the phone to his ear with a trembling hand. “Police operator,” a female voice said in his ear. “Where is the emergency?”

Barba whispered the intersection of the bodega before adding in as quiet a voice as he could, “Robbery in progress. Suspect is armed.”

“We’ll send someone right away,” the dispatcher told him, and Barba hung up, closing his eyes for a brief second.

His pulse was pounding loudly in his ears, but he could still hear the robber shouting at the man behind the counter. He clutched the damned Lean Cuisine like a lifeline, weighing his options. There was a somewhat decent chance that he could sneak up behind the perp and possibly even disarm him, and it was solely due to his time with SVU and the detectives there that he honestly considered it for a moment.

Luckily, common sense kept him right where he was.

He heard the bell over the door jingle again and he chanced a glance around the side of the laundry detergent, his still-hammering heart dropping to somewhere around his ankles.

Because there, strolling into the damn bodega, was none other than Detective Dominick “Call me Sonny” Carisi, looking as calm and capable as Barba had ever seen as he pulled his gun and aimed it at the robber, whose gun was pointed shakily at Carisi’s chest.

“What’s your name?” Carisi asked, still calm despite the gun aimed at him, and Barba couldn’t understand how he pulled that off when Barba’s palms were sweating and his heartbeat was somewhere in the range of tachycardiac.

“Shut the fuck up!” the perp half-shouted, his voice as wavering as his gun.

“I’m not gonna do that,” Carisi told him. “Because when I stop talking, it’s because I’m gonna be pulling this trigger. And I really don’t wanna do that. So why don’t you put the gun down, and we can talk.”

“I said shut up!”

Barba tuned out most of the rest of the conversation, because quite frankly, he had his own problems to worry about. Namely that it had to be Sonny Carisi, of all the cops in this city, who would show up here, of all the places potentially being robbed, just in time to see him, of all people spending a Valentine’s Day by their lonesome, buying a goddamn Lean Cuisine.

Not that he cared about what Carisi thought of him.

Or at least, not that he cared _much_. But even he had to admit that this was pretty pathetic, even for him.

As things at the front of the bodega heated up — “Put the gun down and we’re both gonna walk out of here,” Carisi said loudly — Barba didn’t have much to do besides cower, and he figured he might as well use their distraction to put the Lean Cuisine back so that he could pretend that he was there to pick up something else.

He inched towards the freezer, his journey made perilous as he had to abandon the refuge of the laundry detergent, and he flinched every time the perp or Carisi started yelling. By the time he crept over to the freezer, Carisi and the robber were shouting over each other, and Barba winced as he slowly pulled the freezer door open so that he could slide the Lean Cuisine back inside.

He only needed to open the door about an inch or so, so he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Carisi and the robber were still engaged before he opened the door a little further. He had just about gotten it open enough that he could wedge the Lean Cuisine in when the movement apparently caught the robber’s eye because the next thing he knew—

BANG.

Barba let out a noise that might charitably be called a gulp but was more accurately a shriek, bolting upright and holding the Lean Cuisine in front of him like a shield. Thankfully, the robber was about as good at aiming as he was at robbing a bodega, and the bullet clearly intended for Barba hit a pallet of Mountain Dew six feet to Barba’s left.

While Barba’s immediate reaction was relief as he gasped out the breath he didn’t even know he had been holding, it turned embarrassingly quickly to panic. Not just because the robber was still pointing a gun at him but also because for the first time, Carisi was looking at him.

Almost against his will, Barba locked eyes with Carisi, who looked torn between similar panic to what Barba felt, utter exasperation, and something that might just border on amusement. “Don’t move!” the robber shouted at him, and Barba was almost tempted to roll his eyes at that. Then again, on the off chance the perp’s aim improved, he really didn’t want to get shot, so he settled for giving Carisi a look that he hope thoroughly communicated _Is he fucking serious right now?_ without him having to actually say anything.

Carisi did roll his eyes at that, thoroughly exasperated now, and mouthed, “Don’t move” at Barba, who glared at him in return.

“No shit, Detective,” he mouthed back at Carisi.

While Carisi just ground his teeth in response, the robber looked wildly between the two of them. “Hey, no— none of that,” he shouted. “No, uh, communicating!”

Barba raised both eyebrows, mouthing, “Communicating?” to Carisi, who heaved a sigh as the robber again pointed his gun at Barba.

“I mean it!” the robber said, his voice rising in both volume and pitch. “Stop that—”

Carisi had clearly had enough, taking advantage of his distraction to rush forward, grabbing the robber around the waist and tackling him to the ground. Barba watched the ensuing scuffle with an almost detached sort of fascination, because he didn’t typically get to see Carisi in action.

The sight was perhaps not as appealing as he had been building up in his head. Not that he routinely put a lot of thought toward what Carisi looked like taking a perp down, but when he did, it almost uniformly did not involve the perp bopping Carisi in the nose with a box of Juicy Fruit gum he had grabbed off the front of the checkout counter on the way down.

Luckily for everyone involved, particularly Carisi’s dignity, backup finally arrived, a half-dozen uniformed cops storming into the place and rushing to assist Carisi.

Barba decided now was as good a time as any to take his leave. He headed up to the checkout counter, delicately sidestepping the cops surrounding the perp facedown on the floor, Carisi’s knee digging into his back, and slipped the visibly-shaken clerk a $10 bill with a muttered, “Keep the change.”

Then, with his chin held high and like the mature, almost 50-year-old man he was, he fled the scene.

With any luck, and as incontrovertible proof of a loving and benevolent God, Carisi might just think he was a figment of his imagination.

When not even ten minutes after he got home there was a knock on his door, Barba cast a withering look at his ceiling. “I trusted you,” he muttered, before sighing and making his way to door. “Detective, I’m going to come by the precinct and give my statement in the morning—” he started, breaking off when he saw Carisi.

Mainly because Carisi was grinning and holding a grocery bag and a bouquet of flowers. “Good to know,” Carisi told him, “but I’m not exactly here for that.”

“No?”

“No.” Carisi thrust the bouquet of flowers toward him. “Uh, these are for you.” Barba took the flowers almost automatically, too baffled to do anything else, and blinked from them to Carisi, who was looking a little flushed. “And, uh, I guess these are, too.”

He handed the grocery bag to Barba, who glanced into it and rolled his eyes. “Lean Cuisines?” he asked with a sigh.

“Well, yeah, as an Italian, I couldn’t have you eating a chicken alfredo Lean Cuisine on my conscience,” Carisi told him with a laugh. “I’d never forgive myself.”

Barba glanced into the bag again. “There’s two,” he noted.

Carisi shrugged. “Yeah, well, I was just thinking, uh, you might want some company.”

“Don’t you have a report to do?” Barba asked, more bluntly than he intended, but thankfully, Carisi didn’t seem to take offense, just shrugging again.

“Nah, local precinct took over,” he said, leaning against the doorframe. “And since I didn’t exactly have a great reason for why I was in this neighborhood to respond…”

He trailed off, suddenly going very red, and Barba blinked at him before looking down at the flowers he was still holding, flowers that he just now realized almost certainly did not come from the bodega. “Speaking of,” he said slowly, and Carisi’s flush darkened even further, “what were you doing here?”

“I heard the call on the scanner,” Carisi said weakly, and Barba just looked at him, clearly waiting for a better answer than that. To his surprise, Carisi managed a small smile, his blush fading, just slightly. “It’s Valentine’s Day.”

Barba blinked. “Yes, it is,” he said, trying to figure out where Carisi was going with this. “And?”

“And I thought you might want some company.”

“You said that already,” Barba said, staring up at him.

“No,” Carisi said patiently, his dimples deepening. “I mean that’s why I was in the area.”

“Oh.”

There was something almost nervous in Carisi’s expression, even if his smile didn’t fade as he waited for Barba to say something. When Barba didn’t, Carisi cleared his throat. “So…”

“Well,” Barba said, taking a step back and opening the door a little wider, “luckily for you, there’s nothing I hate more than eating a frozen meal by myself, so you might as well come in.”

Carisi’s grin brightened. “Yeah?”

Barba rolled his eyes. “Just come in before I change my mind.”

Carisi laughed as he followed Barba into his apartment. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Counselor.”

As Barba closed the door behind him, he couldn’t help but think that despite everything, including the Lean Cuisine dinner waiting for him and his near death experience buying the damn thing, with the right company, it just might actually end up happy after all.


End file.
